


Vox

by 14CombatGeishas



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, Cecil Has A Third Eye, Cecil is Mostly Human, Cecil is psychic, Cecil's Family, Cecil's Mother - Freeform, Cecil's teen years, Gen, History Week, Night Vale is a living thing, Night Vale's history, Night Vale's prehistory, Old Woman Josie's childhood, Other characters mentioned - Freeform, Pre-Series, Summer Reading Program, The Voice of Night Vale, and it will involve a mirror, cassette, physical and mental injuries, the events of Cassette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-15
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-15 18:44:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1315324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/14CombatGeishas/pseuds/14CombatGeishas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There has always been a Voice of Night Vale and there always will be.  Cecil Palmer is just the latest in a long line of beings stretching back to the beginning of human life in Night Vale.  This is the story of how the Voice came to be and how Cecil came to be the Voice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Silence Breaks

Winter, 10,000 BCE

 

Night had fallen heavily around the encampment, black as obsidian, impenetrable as stone, and deep as the ocean. The air was dry and cold, alive, every slight sound amplified to monstrous proportions.  Nothing moved.  Nothing dared to move.

 

The moon was gone again. The cycle began anew. They, the First People to find this place, were alone in the desert.  But they, these First People, had come to call this place home; it had been for forty seasons – ten winters, ten springs, ten summers, ten autumns – and it would remain their home until the last of them were dead.

 

This vacant and hungry land, this desperate and desolate place, -- all sand-wastes and bones -- this was the Young Girl’s home.   This was where she was born.  Where her father died. Where she played. Where she ate. Where she saw. Where the creeping dread that reminded her she was alive clutched her, comforting as a mother’s arms.   Things had changed very little for forty seasons. 

 

Now they were changing rapidly; too quickly for the Young Girl to fully absorb, to understand.  But, then, no one seemed to understand. At the very least they could not explain it to her.  Not even the shaman who was supposed to see everything.  Not even the hunters who were supposed to have seen everything. Not even the old women who were supposed to know everything.  _None_ of the grown-ups could, even though they were supposed to understand everything.  _None_ of the grown-ups could explain to her what had happened to them.

 

The Young Girl sat by the fire, hunched, clutching her knees to her chest.  Goosebumps prickled her arms despite the warmth. Why were things the way they were? Why was her family gone?

 

There were things in the dark.

 

But that wasn’t what frightened the Young Girl. There were _always_ things in the dark; things that were not quite people even if they shared the same shape.  They were flatter, more worn -- older than people.  Figures, was the best way to describe them. Figures somewhere between shadow and nightmare; here and gone; terrible and sublime; monstrous and awesome. The figures watched them: the Young Girl, her family, her people.  Night after pitch-black night the figures kept their vigil. They watched unblinkingly, unbroken, but unmoving; never taking a step closer or farther away.

 

They were there during the day now, blacker than the night ever was. So dark it hurt her eyes to look. They never moved. They never came closer or went farther away; not even when someone struck up the courage to face them; not that they were ever truly threatened. The person never got far before they broke down, crying uncontrollably, tearing at their own hair and gouging bloody holes in their skin with their clutching fingernails.  Even the biggest and strongest grown-ups would be reduced to sniffling infants.  They would find their loved ones and hug them, beg in shaking voices to be held, just to be kept safe and reassured that they were alive, that they were all of them alive and somehow safe under the uncaring sun. 

 

It seemed so foolish to the Young Girl. Of course they weren’t safe. Who could be?  Even the people who must have lived beyond the desert and beyond the gaze of the figures were not safe.  Humans were so small and fragile in the face of everything around them.  They were predators to some, but prey to others.  Danger was a consequence of being alive.  No matter what reassurances were cooed in the dark, no matter how tightly one clung to their loved ones, no matter how hard and well they fought, something would kill them in the end – even if it was just time.  Eventually their bodies would betray them; bending, wearing, breaking under the years, grinding them into dust.  Death came for them all; it just came to some sooner than others.  She was a child, but she could accept this.  She didn’t know why the grown-ups couldn’t.

 

The Young Girl looked away from the heavy night and glanced up at the woman playing with her hair.  The woman didn’t understand.  She was afraid like the rest. The woman was not the Young Girl’s mother.  Her mother disappeared.  To where, the Young Girl still did not know. 

 

Her mother didn’t die like her father had, mauled by a pack of spider-wolves over a kill.  She didn’t die at all.  She was simply gone.  No one had seen any trace of her for four days. 

 

That was when her sister started acting strangely.  She had a fever. Her face felt like it was on fire. It burned, alternating white and red, flushed and ruddy.  She was itchy.  She thrashed. She wanted to move, to travel, to seek. 

 

Then, two days ago, the Young Girl’s sister rose. She walked.  She walked faster than seemed possible for someone so ill.  Her head was bowed. She spoke words that the Young Girl did not understand.  No one understood.  That was why they did not let the Young Girl follow, even though it meant she was all alone.   Her sister walked away towards the sun, her back to the camp and her people.

 

The heat mirage closed around her. The desert seemed to absorb her.  It was as if she had never been there – been anywhere – at all.  She left behind only footprints and the anonymous artifacts of a life half-lived.  Anyone seeing these tracks would not know who she was, why she came this way. They would not know that anything unusual was happening, that these footprints were anything but those of a sentry or one attending to their sorry crops, or anyone else.  They would only see the tracks of a human being, just another unnamed person in the unnamed desert.  Then the wind wiped even those from the sand, erasing her path.  She was gone now.  Plucked out of time and history. 

 

The Young Girl had slept the last two nights alone. The woman, the one now playing with her hair, sometimes came to see her, to bring her food and comfort.  The Young Girl wasn’t sure if it worked.  But then, she wasn’t sure of anything.  The only thing she knew was that her sister would come back, no matter what the others said.  No one listened to her, though.  She was too young to be heeded.  Even the woman now sharing her fire did not believe her. 

 

But perhaps the woman wasn’t there to help the Young Girl; perhaps it was the other way around.  Maybe the woman sought only to comfort herself, hiding from the dark unknown, stopping darkness from touching her. The woman played with the Young Girl’s hair, slipping desert plants and beads into it.  They stood out like stars against the blackness. She whispered gently to the Young Girl.

 

When the Young Girl asked about her family, her vanished mother and her missing sister there was no answer. This woman didn’t know; no one who came to her did.  Most looked away. They went elsewhere. They talked about the Young Girl, pitied her, all alone now, driven mad by it; so sure her sister would come back, so sure she was alive out there, somewhere beyond everything they knew -- as if such a thing was possible.  Poor child.  Poor thing.  They all came to care for her, each in their own way. They brought her food, they brought her toys, they brought her dogs to snuggle and play with.  They did all they could do, all they always did. There were many orphans, the desert created scores of them – from heat, from animals, from madness, from illness, by strange disappearance, by stranger means.

 

But this Young Girl…there was something special about her.  They all believed it.  They all felt it. She was the first one to be born here, after the group decided to settle.  Others followed; they were all special, too.  But she seemed, to them at least, to be remarkable. Maybe it was only because she was first.  Maybe it was because she seemed to see things no one else did. Maybe it was because she dared to look at the watching figures and to approach the talc spire, if only with her head bowed.  Maybe it was because they knew, somehow, deep in their cores, -- in their joined unconscious -- that she would live and keep on living.  She would bury them all and bury those to come.  Death would not reach her, because if she fell, they somehow knew, so would they all. 

 

When she fell, whoever lived in this desolate desert would fall with her. 

 

The Young Girl did not know it yet. She was too small to understand such things.  She couldn’t see beyond herself to realize what exactly they were whispering about. Her child-world absorbed her.

 

Maybe this woman would care for her now, the Young Girl thought.  Maybe they were right and her mother and sister were dead, like her father. But she saw him, his body, the blood and bone and meat.  Her mother was simply gone and her sister…why did they let her go away? Were they afraid? Were they afraid because her sister was sick?  Because her sister was unstoppable, inconsolable? Because they didn’t know where her sister was going?  Because her sister _did know_?

 

Her sister was still out there. Her sister was alive. Her sister would come home.   The Young Girl was sure of it.  Her sister would come back and soon.  She had to! The Young Girl missed her horribly.

 

Why had she left her?  Why did her sister abandon her?  What had she done wrong?  The Young Girl looked back up at the woman petting her hair.  The woman smiled at her, but the Young Girl didn’t feel its warmth.  Tears blurred her vision.  She felt so alone.  She buried her face into the woman’s soft brown skin and cried.

 

At first the woman held her gently, cradling her and trying to calm her tears.   She cooed and kissed the top of the Young Girl’s head with dry lips. But after a few minutes something happened. The woman straightened, her grip on the Young Girl tightened painfully.  She pulled the child close to her, pressing her face into her chest, one hand around her shoulders, and one hand at the back of her head. The knuckles clutching her shoulder were bloodless and pale, as was the face the Young Girl looked up into. The Young Girl managed to wiggle free and look at the thing the woman was trying to hide from her.

 

It was her sister.

 

The Young Girl jumped up, pulling out of the woman’s arms.  The woman gave a wordless shout and tried to grab her, but her quivering fingers wrapped helplessly around open air.  The Young Girl ran to embrace her sister.  But she was ignored. Her sister said nothing.  Her breathing was ragged. Her sister was dirty, covered in sand and sweat.  Her feet and knees were bloody and skinned, as if she had been walking – no, crawling – for miles.  Her long black hair fell around her face, obscuring her eyes.  The inside of her arms and her palms had gashes, wounds. There was blood on her chin and smeared across her cheek, dried streaks of brownish red trailing from her mouth across her face. A few stray hairs were pasted to her skin by dried blood. She walked a little shakily, uneasy on her ruined feet.  She leaned heavily to one side, bloody hand braced against the wall. There were bruises around her neck, like the coils of a snake. 

 

The Young Girl reached out again. She touched her sister’s hand and her sister gasped but did not pull away.  She asked her where she had been for two days.  Why had she left?  What happened to her wherever she had been?

 

Up close her sister looked bloodless and tired. Her sister looked down at her, through the tangled curtain of her hair. The Young Girl’s stomach wrenched, the eyes in her sister’s head were not her eyes. Something had changed. Much had changed. Once her eyes were deep brown, almost black, shining and warm.  They were purple now, a shade beyond anything the Young Girl had ever seen; too bright to be real, too intense.  And instead of her sister’s usual warm gaze was something older, sharper. There was too much behind those new eyes.  They had seen more than her sister had and it was reflected in them. Somehow these bright purple eyes were darker than black, dark but shining like stars, as if they were the only stars in the void.  They were wiser than her sixteen years. They were beyond human, the universe floating in her skull.

 

Her sister looked at the Young Girl with confusion.  It was as if she was struggling to remember who the Young Girl was – like she was a stranger or an acquaintance long forgotten.  Slowly, familiarity crossed into those weird new eyes, yes. It was like dawn, her dirty fingers breathed over the Young Girl’s cheek as if to make sure she was real.

 

 There was a bloody crease on her forehead, above her right eye.  A streak of dried blood was smeared like paint, a stripe downward over one purple eye. Was it a wound? What else could it have been?   But the Young Girl could not convince herself that that was what it was. 

 

The Young Girl’s sister put a shaking hand on her shoulder. On the back of it, on the back of both hands, the Young Girl realized, were marks, drawings.  And another, etched in the center of her chest, just below where the collarbones met.  A few simple lines and dots making the image of a human eye in deep black.  They looked old, these eyes, as if they had always been there.  And for a moment she thought that perhaps they _had_ and she forgot somehow.  They looked as if they belonged there, burned under her skin. They reminded the Young Girl of the tattoos some of the elders had, dug into the flesh with spider-wolf quills and ink made from beetles and flowers.  But, she realized, they were nothing like tattoos at all, they weren’t scars, they were simply markings, like the pattern of a snake’s scales.

 

The longer she looked, the more the Young Girl became sure that those eyes were watching her.  She knew that they could see her long before she actually saw them move.  They never blinked.  They only watched.

 

Her sister stepped away from her, towards the stone wall where the shamans and hunters painted and prayed. Her long spidery fingers ghosted over familiar images, pausing every so often as if trying to comprehend what was painted there.  She quivered. Her galaxy eyes swept over the great murals as if she was seeing them for the first time.  She let out a noise, a howl, a sound a human being should not have been able to make.  It was something deep, a sound that seemed to come from the core of the earth itself, echoed up through the glowing canyon and erupted from the throats of the unseen predators in the dark.  It made the Young Girl shiver and shrink back, her hands clasped over her ears. The Young Girl wasn’t sure when her sister picked up the pigments, when she recovered from the sound her sister was already using them.  She was chuckling as she rubbed the red dye (or was it blood?) over the hovering images of buffalo and hunters.  It must have been then, when the Young Girl was hunched from the force of her sister’s voice and her sister was engrossed in her work that the woman ran.

 

Her sister began to paint. She painted furiously. Her entire body seemed in sync; she moved like a dancer but on a smaller scale; every motion practiced and elegant, but minute.   It was in her fingertips, it was in her wrist, it was in her elbow, the twitch of going onto tiptoe, the slight bend of her knee.  The Young Girl never saw her sister paint before. She sat transfixed, watching as the pigments and lines took shape. 

 

She didn’t hear them until they were upon them.  A dozen or so of the others, only adults, men and women, armed and frightened.  They stood in the entryway as if afraid to go further. The woman who had petted the Young Girl’s hair led them, and it was only now that the Young Girl realized the woman had left at all.  The Young Girl felt the sting of betrayal burrowing painfully in her chest. Her face was heating up with anger.  She was about to yell, to tell them to leave, to tell them everything was all right. Her sister was back. She didn’t need them anymore.

 

But her sister half turned from the wall. On the wall she had drawn them, the figures that watched them in the darkness.  And they were watching _them_ , drawn onto the wall was the tribe, working, sleeping, playing, buried. One was encased in an oval, a dark purple shape with tendrils that whipped through the painted tribe, around the figures, around everything. 

 

Her sister told the others to stop. She pointed to the figures in the dark.  She pointed to the drawing of each of the tribe.  And she pointed to that central figure, alive inside a cage of color. She told them she knew now. She knew what was in the desert and she knew what was inside the desert.  She knew it was alive.  She knew the desert loved them.  She knew the desert’s love was more terrible and more awesome than its hate. She knew what the desert would bring.  She could speak for it.  She would speak for it.

 

As she spoke she kept painting. The lines she had drawn around the figure in the oval – the figure that was herself – lengthened, encasing everything, spiraling. But they all came back to one point far below the rest, below even the bodies buried underground.  It was all lines curling like smoke, poised as a spider, and large as the sky. The lines all met at some point in the center, deep below the people.  They did not all start there nor did they end there, they simply came to meet at that point. Just looking at the crude outline her sister created made the Young Girl’s hair stand on end. A shiver coursed down her spine but she was not so afraid as the grown-ups watching.

 

The Young Girl’s sister turned then, her back to her creation.  No one had moved for a long time.  She brushed the hair from her face.  The crease, the Young Girl realized, was not a gash.  It was a third eye.  And it was open now. There was no pupil, only an expanse of almost-black-purple. It could see them all. And it could see beyond them. The Young Girl felt it looking through her.  The grown-ups took a tentative step forward weapons raised, whispers about that eye rushing through the crowd. 

 

Let me speak.  Her sister said.  Let me speak.

 

They let her speak.  And she spoke for years.

 

They let her paint. And she filled the all the caves.

 

The pupil of her third eye waxed and waned with the moon, a glowing yellow circle when the moon was full and that flat expanse of almost-black on the new moon.  It marked the days, the lunar cycle, the seasons. Days turned to months, months turned to seasons, seasons turned to years, years turned to decades.

 

They listened. 

 

They watched. 

 

Her sister spoke for the desert. She told them what was happening around them, below them, above them, in them.  Sometimes she spoke plainly, sometimes in riddles, sometimes in ways that no one understood. 

 

For the rest of her long life she spoke. The Young Girl watched proudly. She never wanted to be anything but her sister’s sister.  The Young Girl only ever wanted to be by her side. But, her sister told her one day, the Young Girl was important, too.   One day her sister would die.  One day someone else would speak for the desert and the Young Girl would be there. And then that Voice would fall silent too, replaced by another.  The Young Girl would still be there. 

 

She would always be there. When she fell, so would the village.  The Young Girl aged, but slowly, in strange spurts.  When her sister died, the Young Girl was only a Young Woman despite decades passing from that day that her sister began to speak.  Her sister herself had withered and become old. One day her third eye closed.

 

On that day, a young man, suddenly orphaned the week before, became sick.  He was found beaten and left for dead not far from his home. He had what at first looked like a bleeding wound on his forehead.  But the Young Woman knew better. 

 

He was brought back and laid in before the shaman who worked hard to wake the child.  Her sister died shortly thereafter.  When she did the boy jerked awake.  When his eyes opened they were the same eyes her sister had – unreal purple and three of them, although his third was just above the left eyebrow.   And he screamed.  He screamed and thrashed and cried.  Then he went silent for more than a day.  When he spoke again it was with the Young Woman’s sister’s authority.

 

Her sister was the first Voice of Night Vale.

 

That boy was the second.

 

The chain began and the Young Woman knew that it would never end. 

***

 

 

She remained in the village as it grew into a town as the First People were joined by others, either by trade or by marriage.   She never became a shaman but was treated with almost more reverence than they.  Generations sought her out.  She was not their advisor; that was the Voice’s job, she was merely a comforting relic.  She was their mother when she was young, their grandmother as she got older. She watched them waste away, each one.  She watched them all die.  She gave up loving, or at least loving personally, after a few centuries.  She could love them all at a distance but she had to understand that they were brief and she was long.  They were candles, she was the sun.

 

She was there when the White Men came. She was there when her people were hunted in their own land.  When the time came, she fought against them, tooth and nail, as hard as the others did.  For years her life was misery.  For years they were hunted, slaughtered, enslaved, rounded up.  For years they were treated like beasts by the beastly invaders.  For years there was nothing but pain and heartache.  For years she wished she would die but did not, would not, because they needed her still. 

 

But then it all changed. After a generation or so, as soon as White children were born in the desert, they – the invaders – were absorbed into the town.  The desert took their children from them to raise them as part of itself. They were no longer invaders. They, like her people, were enveloped by the desert’s invisible tendrils. The desert loved them all. It fed off of them all. It needed them all. And they all needed the desert. They all became part of the desert. When the Voice spoke, it spoke to them all. 

 

The Voice was born among these new people, too. And the population blurred into one mass.  They no longer fought each other; they fought the desert that loved them and drained them. They no longer hated each other; they were only weary of those who came from Outside.  They were a community under the desert sun. Outside, outside they were something else.  The Old Woman knew that beyond the desert, things were different.  Things were miserable and bloody.  Outside there was no such thing as solidarity. Outside there was no ancient enemy that loved them as a farmer loved his cows, and so men fought each other instead.

 

She remained.  She watched the town become a city. She watched the roads turn from dust to stone to concrete.  She heard their accents change, saw their population flood the desert. They were all children of the town now.  In the world outside of her desert she knew things were different, but in Night Vale they all belonged to Night Vale. 

 

Every few generations she changed her name. Sometimes she held onto one longer than others.  Every few generations the people changed what they called her. But they all knew her. They all knew that she would always be there.  They forgot why the Old Woman lived and why she kept on living but they found comfort in her existence even if they did not know why. 

 

Years went by in blinks, here and gone too fast to notice.  Centuries swelled and crashed like waves.  Millennia pounded on like drumbeats, steady, unceasing, rhythmic. Only two things remained constant – the Voice of Night Vale and the Old Woman. 


	2. The Voice Cracks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leonard Burton becomes tired. Old Woman Josie becomes afraid. Cecil Palmer becomes conscious.

Spring, 1989 CE

Old Woman Josie stood in her kitchen making a pie.  It was an offering for the newcomer.  Josie felt it was her obligation as the oldest living person in Night Vale to know all its residents.  It was important to her, knowing people.  Even if she only watched their lives from afar, she wanted to be able to share their experiences in some way.  She was a catalog of all their stories. Stories stretching back as far as human habitation. The paintings that had once graced the cave walls were gone now, worn away by time and humanity – both its fear and its curiosity about itself. 

 

The new woman came to town the previous weekend.  She rented a trailer near Josie’s ancient home.  She was a tall white woman with bright green eyes.  She wore her brown hair long and loose, curling down her back. When she moved in she was wearing a flimsy white dress, which shone like gossamer under the brutal desert sun, as well as a battered white sunhat.  Her name was Frances Donaldson. She had one bag, a blue suitcase held shut by a leather belt.  Josie did not know why this woman came to Night Vale.  That was why she would visit her this evening, armed with a pie and an eager ear.  She would hear this newcomer’s story. 

 

She would have a story, obviously.

 

No one came to Night Vale without a story.

 

All their stories were  different and yet all the same.  Something compelled them to leave their old homes. Sometimes the world Outside chased them away with its prejudices.  Sometimes they could not cope with the grim responsibilities existence beyond Night Vale forced onto them.  Sometimes it was curiosity.  Sometimes they had no clear reason for coming to Night Vale – they just decided one day to leave the world they knew.  They left everything behind to find something they could not name in that wide expanse of the unknown still hiding in the American desert.  But regardless of why they left, or how they got to Night Vale, they had stories to share.

 

Josie had the radio on as she baked. Night Vale Community Radio had just finished a recording of the all-banshee production of _The Marriage of Figaro_.  Josie was still very proud of that show.  When Leonard Burton came on, Josie was up to her elbows in flour, rolling out the crust.  She was only half listening, which is probably why it took so long for Josie to notice something was wrong. 

 

“Spiders cover every inch of you. Spiders cover every inch of us all.  We are all secretly spiders.  Greetings from Night Vale.”

 

Josie paused, stretched half way across the counter, her brow furrowed tightly, ear cocked closer to the old radio balanced on the windowsill.  For a moment she thought – _hoped_ – she had imagined it.  But it was there as he continued with the news.  There was a faint but distinct weariness in his voice.  He sounded like a marathon runner who has suddenly realized that _this_ race does not end or a skier looking not down a slope but over the precipice into the infinite abyss.  There would be no rescue, there would be no finish line, and the athlete was resigned to a prolonged death by exhaustion.  Fatigue was creeping into every high-pitched word, heavy on Leonard’s purplish tongue.

 

Josie’s heart caught.  Could it really be time already?  Leonard had only been on a decade and a half. He couldn’t already be fading out, could he? 

 

But there it was.  There was that quiet twinge, that undeniable ache. Leonard was folding in at the edges.  Spiritually, he was fading.  Emotionally, he was falling.  Physically, it was only a matter of time.  There was nothing Josie could do.  No one could undo what was already happening; they could only prepare.

 

No one else would have heard that tremble in Leonard Burton’s voice.  No one in Night Vale or beyond would hear what Josie did.  But she had listened to every Voice Night Vale had ever used.  She knew what to listen for and was always unconsciously listening for it.  The edges of Leonard’s spirit were definitely fraying.

 

Someone would have to replace him. No, not “someone.” _Cecil_ would have to replace him.  Cecil was still a child.  Cecil wasn’t even finished with high school yet. Cecil still depended on his mother.  His voice hadn’t even changed yet. 

 

Now Josie realized why the Prophecy had been divined so soon, it was almost Cecil’s time to step up to the mic. What had generally been regarded as the work of an overzealous diviner looking for a promotion, showed itself now to be necessity.  Cecil Palmer’s destiny was coming, barreling towards him, fast and unstoppable as a freight train.

 

It would collide with him soon. It would claim him. It may have already.

 

The idea terrified Josie, Cecil opening up without any help or guidance.  It would happen today.  She could feel it in her bones.  Her bones were never wrong.

 

 She abandoned her piecrust without even bothering to refrigerate it to keep it safe from the desert heat and the Faceless Old Woman.  She was in the car in less than a minute. Josie’s car was old, like her house, like her radio, like her TV, like her furniture, like everything else she owned, like herself.  It was old, but it worked. When she turned the key it protested, but after a cough from the engine and a groan from Josie it took, and Josie sped towards the Palmer house.

 

She knew the Palmers well. She had known them since long before they were called “Palmer” and she was called “Josie.”  Cecil’s ancestors had been there among the First People with Josie.  Josie could still see them in Cecil’s eyes, in the line of his jaw, in his long spindly hands, in the curve of his shoulders.  She could see the hundreds of generations before Cecil.  It was vaguely comforting, having someone so young seem so old. 

 

His roots went all the way back, to the first ones to find Night Vale, the people Josie had grown up with so many centuries ago. But over the millennia his line mixed with dozens – hundreds of other people, from here and there scattered across time.  She remembered the white man who gave the family its name in the 1880s, the Russian-Jewish family that drifted into Night Vale with the daughter who played the violin and won the heart of Cecil’s great-grandfather, Cecil’s Blob grandmother – Masters-of-us-all-rest-her-soul, she was the kindest being Josie ever had the pleasure of knowing – the black man in the 1720s who escaped from slavery and came West, the first white woman to stay in Night Vale even when the rest of her caravan did not, long before the wave of white settlers crashed upon them, the black woman who opened the first general store in Night Vale, where the Ralph's stood now, the Chinese migrant who escaped a lynch mob in the 1840s, the sideshow freak in the 1910s, and all the others – a myriad of colors and eras and beings – that made Cecil Palmer. Over the years she’d watched the chain of his family grow, link by link, person by person until it came to this point, to Cecil.

 

And they’d all come together so well. He was a smart boy, energetic, enthusiastic to a charming degree.  He was compassionate.  He was curious.  He was a natural born talker and writer. He was generally humble.  He was all the things the Voice should be.  

 

Cecil was going to be the next Voice of Night Vale.  He was born to do it. She could tell you that even without that blasted prophecy.  She had known every Voice Night Vale ever had.  She could spot the next one the second she saw him.

 

 But even if he _wasn’t_ the next Voice, Josie would have liked Cecil Palmer.  They became friends over the past few years, far closer friends than Josie had had in centuries. They became close when she saw Cecil at the bowling alley attempting to teach himself the sport.  She took him under her wing and it all escalated from there.  Soon they were meeting outside the bowling alley, he would bike to her house just to say hello. He was either interested in opera or put on a good show of faking it.  She taught him how to knit.  He listened, wide-eyed, to her stories about the Old Days, the Older Days, and the Oldest Days.   She listened to his stories about the life of a modern teenager, his dreams, his crushes, his fears, his embarrassments, his favorite classes, his internship, and the radio he loved so much.  They gossiped.  They drank tea together at her coffee table.  He would ride to her house on weekends and stop by on his way home from the radio station. 

 

He was like the grandson she never had – or like the grandsons she refused to have more of after watching too many age and die and crumble to dust.  She knew one day Cecil would die too, and that hurt her, but it was how it had to be. It was the way things were. She thought she would be over death after all these years, but sometimes it still hit her hard. Because of this, Cecil Palmer was the first person she’d gotten close to in years, because she feared death – not her own, but that which would come to the people around her and leave her untouched to bury the dead.

 

From Josie’s perspective, Night Vale itself didn’t change. Things were built over it, structures were torn down and rebuilt, but the desert remained the same underneath.  The living beings in Night Vale were a constantly shifting tide. They each lived out their brief lives and died, releasing cells and souls into the universe. It was all so short, just a single cosmic moment -- a flash -- that was all human life was.

 

Josie still cared about the people in the town and that was why she refused to get close to them.  She would watch over them, keep track of them, but she was afraid to feel too much.  Then Cecil politely smashed his way into her life, all energy and enthusiasm.

 

She had hoped Leonard Burton would hold on a lot longer.  Being the Voice was no easy task, she understood that.  She saw what all that power, all that knowledge did to people. But it was, above all, unpredictable. Leonard might shock them all and hang on for another few decades. Or he might die before the next broadcast. That was why Josie had to find Cecil. There was too much she did not (and could not) know.  And Cecil meant too much to her to let him go this alone. 

 

She hadn’t seen Cecil in a few days and wondered if it was because he was looking for his mother.  She would have disappeared by now.  Josie wondered what would happen to Cecil’s brother. _She_ hadn’t vanished when her sister became the Voice but so many other siblings had.  The Voices were plucked out of their family trees, removed from human history to be placed in something much larger, grander. 

 

Josie sometimes wondered why she was spared. Perhaps Night Vale knew that its Voices would need someone who had been there before.  She imagined it was something like that, but never thought about it too hard.  She was unwilling to push her luck and not ready to die, just yet. After all, it had been much harder years ago.  This now was easier than almost all the other nows.  And she liked experiencing nows, no matter how tired and lonely she became. Something in her was unwilling to die. 

 

She reached the Palmer house in about ten minutes. This was faster than usual and Josie wasn’t sure whether she had been speeding or if the town had bent for her and her beaten-up old car. Either solution was perfectly reasonable. 

 

She knocked on the door.

No answer. 

She pounded on it. 

Nothing.

She tried the handle.

Locked.

She called Cecil’s name.

Silence.

She cursed viciously, a habit she generally disliked.

 

Finding the backdoor, too, was locked, Josie settled on smashing the kitchen window with the emergency brick she kept in her purse.  The window exploded spectacularly and she carefully pulled herself through the pane, into the Palmer’s small one-story house. 

 

It was dark inside.  Dark and quiet as if no human life had ever graced its halls. The silence was deafening. It pounded in her head and rang in her ears.  Everything was still, still enough that she could almost make out the Faceless Old Woman as she filled the sugar bowl with lice.  Josie crunched carefully through the broken glass and crossed the kitchen. The kitchen connected to the living room, which was just as still and silent as the kitchen had been. The shades were drawn tightly over the windows, probably because of the gorgon attack the day before. The lights were all off. The room was dark as night. Outside the sun was only beginning to dip below the horizon, inside it was already midnight.

 

Josie found the wall switch and turned on the lights.  The suddenly illuminated room made her shiver despite herself.  It was unnerving, like a museum dedicated to lives long past. The lives had only just faded. But yesterday may as well have been centuries ago.

 

On the tan walls were pictures. There were frames around smiling faces, a catalog of happiness, memories for when the darkness closed in. There was Cecil, awkwardly smiling for his middle school graduation, dressed in the ceremonial robes and soft meat crown tradition dictated, teeth bared, crisscrossed with a railway track of braces in his school colors.  There was Cecil’s father, now dead fourteen years, young and handsome and un-maimed.  There were Cecil and his brother, the elder with his arm wrapped around the younger, both grinning madly, happily, at the camera.  There was Cecil’s mother back when she still remembered how to smile, before those visions drove her mad, and when she still had both her eyes. Perhaps she was better off gone, Josie thought. 

 

Then she shook her head. What was she thinking? “Perhaps” never mattered. “What ifs” were pointless.  In the end hypothetical questions and lost opportunities were useless; the world consisted of what was and what wasn’t.  There was no way to deny what was, nor a way of finding what wasn’t.  So there was no point in fighting either, or imagining things otherwise. 

 

Cecil’s backpack had been thrown onto the couch.  His shoes, narrow and violently pink high-tops, were by the front door.  The perfect empty imprint of a life, like a footprint in the sand.  He had come home. That was good, at least. She called Cecil’s name, her insides writhing at the ominous silence she got in response.  She turned into the hallway – and there he was. Cecil was sprawled out on his back just below the mirror at the end of the hall.  

 

Her heart, which had been jack-hammering against her sternum so hard she thought it might break, caught in her chest. For a moment she stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, unable to even breathe. Then she saw the gentle rise and fall of Cecil’s chest. 

 

He was alive. 

 

Unconscious, but alive.  And really, Old Woman Josie thought, unconscious was probably the safest thing he could be at a time like this. He was sprawled on the floor, spread eagled, bloodied.  Beside him on the floor lay a tape-recorder, clicking persistently.  It had reached the end of the tape but was still trying to record.  That quiet plastic tick was the only sound in the entire house.  Josie knelt down and pressed STOP.  With shaking fingers, she slipped the recorder into her bag. Josie didn’t realize how scared she was until she saw how badly her old but steady hands quivered. On Cecil’s other side was a thick black sheet, like a funeral shroud.  His fingers were barely touching the fabric, as if he’d dropped it and it had fluttered down just out of reach. For a moment Josie could not figure out where it had come from or why Cecil would have it out. Then she remembered. The mirror.  Cecil’s mother had started covering the mirrors in the house. Cecil had said she did that when she was anxious.  Cecil must have pulled it off the mirror.

 

Josie rose and took up the sheet, throwing it over the mirror and covering it again.  She had a feeling Cecil would not want to see his reflection just now. 

 

Josie then knelt beside Cecil. He was neither small, nor tall, for his age, neither thin nor fat.  He had jet-black hair cut so it hung around his chin.  He wore glasses, although those were lying broken against the wall as if they’d been thrown.  She brushed the dark hair from his forehead and found his new third eye, dead center.  It was still closed (thank the Makers).  Blood oozed from under the lid.  It was probably very new.  Cecil was covered in bruises and wounds, clearly having at least attempted to put up some kind of a fight.  His nose and lips were covered in drying blood, there were wounds on his hands and arms, a bruise circled one of his original eyes and banded his neck. One of his blob-inherited tentacles lay extended at his side, the end bruised and torn severely.

 

Poor Cecil must have struggled hard. He didn’t realize that the thing attacking him would win.  It would win and it would become part of him, sealed up inside his skin as much a part of Cecil Palmer as Cecil Palmer was.  It was in there even now, writhing around in his unconsciousness, inhabiting his heart and brain. 

 

The Voice was always two entities at once – it was always the person it was born as, and it was Night Vale itself, encased in human flesh.  Both parts influenced each other.  Both parts changed the other.  Both parts needed the other to exist. 

 

The Cecil Palmer who woke up this morning was gone, dead; and Night Vale as it was when it took hold of Leonard Burton was now different as well.  Night Vale was touched, influenced, by Cecil Palmer, growing around him just as he adapted to it.  Cecil would always be Cecil, but “Cecil” was now defined differently, like a passage translated from one language to another, far older, one.  The boy whimpered in his non-dreams. 

 

“Cecil,” Josie whispered gently. “Cecil, can you hear me?”

 

There was no response beyond a shiver. Josie touched his cheek and found his skin clammy with sweat.  “Come on, Cecil, wake up!” She considered shaking him but decided instead to remain gentle.  He was only fifteen and he was hurt, severely.  This whole thing was going to be difficult; it was going to be so trying for the poor child.  But he would be fine. He would survive. It was what he was born to do. “Cecil.”

 

His eyes, the original two, fluttered, his breathing caught.  “J-Josie?” he whispered, barely audible and weak.

 

“Yes,” she answered.  “I’m here.” 

 

“Wh-what’s…what’s going on?” Cecil asked, the trickle of blood from his forehead dripped into his eyes.  He blinked fast and squeezed his eyes closed again. “Are you in my house?”

 

“You didn’t come by this week, I got worried,” Josie lied. 

 

Despite having known Cecil and his family for literally eons Josie hadn’t ever been inside this house before. Cecil’s eyes opened again, squinting and watering, a bloody tear leaking from the corner of the left one.

 

The eyes that had closed were deep brown. The eyes that opened were electric purple. Night Vale was taking its place in his soul, burrowing into him.  Josie’s eyes flicked to his third, large and perfectly centered in his forehead. There was movement under the lid like a dreaming sleeper, but it didn’t look as if it were about to open.

 

“Oh!  Sorry,” Cecil’s cracked and bloody lips grinned apologetically, revealing the glimmer of his braces.  It was still Cecil’s smile, which was comforting. It was always comforting when she found out how much Night Vale left in its Voice.  It was important to her that Cecil, some part of Cecil, remain human after all of this.

 

One of his hands twitched and feebly rose an inch or so off the ground before falling again, as if this simple motion was too much for Cecil. Josie imagined he’d used all of his strength to fight Night Vale, now so drained that he literally couldn’t lift a finger.  

 

She pitied him immensely. She couldn’t remember the last time it had been someone so young. No, that was a lie. She remembered everything; sometimes it simply became jostled, displaced from its context -- the same events, the order wrong. It had been at least a century since a Voice had been under twenty when Night Vale came for them.   Josie clucked sympathetically. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

 

“Yeah, good idea,” said Cecil weakly as she dragged him to his feet. He staggered and slipped backward like a discarded puppet, his feet simply would not bear his weight. Josie caught him deftly, feeling the ache in her ancient joints as she dove for him.   


Cecil looked slightly stunned. “Th-thank you...” he said weakly. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” An awkward laugh bubbled painfully from his throat. 

 

“I do,” Josie said.

 

“You do?” Cecil asked, his voice becoming slightly higher as he asked, urgent and pressing.  “What happened?!”

 

“Looks like you’ve been in a fight,” Josie supplied, half dragging him towards the bathroom.  It was the only answer she would give him now.  She had to take him into this slowly so that he understood.

 

“No!” he shouted as she reached for the doorknob, his voice stronger than it had been before.

 

Josie frowned.  “I need a sink to clean out your wounds.” 

 

“Th-the kitchen has a sink too, and it doesn’t have…” he trailed off, but his eyes darted down the hall toward the mirror as if it were a venomous snake or growling tablesaw. Josie followed his gaze and understood. She and her old bones had been right as usual. 

 

“Alright, alright. You’re lucky it’s not far,” she said changing her trajectory.   

 

The progress to the kitchen was slow, Cecil could barely stand on his own and Old Woman Josie was too sore, too old to move faster than a pace that would embarrass a snail.  Once there, Josie slid Cecil into one of the kitchen chairs and he fell heavily against its back.

 

The wind was coming in through the broken window. Night had come. Somewhere deep within Josie’s mind, the night still provoked something powerful. It terrified her, but she adored it. It drained her, but it made her feel alive. It was the best and worst of things. It was the stark truth the daylight concealed. The breeze coming through the broken window was cold and pure. She saw Cecil shiver in his seat, clammy from the sweat and blood clinging to his brown flesh. 

 

The spell of her thoughts was broken, as it so often was, by the urgency of reality. In having nothing but time, she long ago realized how little of it there actually was.  The present was always ready, always poised, to strike.

 

She crossed to the sink, dragging her booted feet. She found paper towels, tore off a sheet, and wet it. “Where do you keep your Holiday Emergency Kit?” Josie asked. 

 

“The one for Flag Day is under the sink,” Cecil said. 

 

“That’ll work,” said Josie, crouching.  Flag Day was not usually one of the more dangerous holidays, but sometimes things got hairy, depending on how large the flag flocks were. She pulled the heavy crate out from the cabinet.  The Palmers were well prepared and under the repellent, flares, and back up Blood Stones, Josie found a well-stocked first aid kit.

 

The whole time she muttered, half to herself, half to Cecil. More to herself when she realized Cecil was not so keen to answer. When she straightened and placed the first-aid kit on the counter, bright red and emblazoned with the words “REMAIN CALM” and “MAKE PEACE WITH YOUR GODS,” she realized just how out of it Cecil was. His newly purple eyes were distant, lost; his bloody lip was trembling, his face was bloodless. The hair stuck to the blood smears on his face and to that still shut third eye.  For a second he looked like her, that long dead sister.  But then, he looked like them all, like every Voice. 

 

“I’m going to clean you up, alright, Cecil?” she brought the wet paper towel to his face. He nodded, just the slightest decline of the head, wincing as if even that brought on waves of pain.

 

“Am...am I...am I alive?” Cecil asked in response. Josie used a cotton swab to clean the gashes in his cheek with iodine. He hissed in pain as it made contact.

 

“Does that answer you question?  Dead people don’t feel pain.  It’s one of the perks of being dead,” Josie told him, continuing the clean the wound.

 

“But my mother told me...” he trailed off. 

 

“What?  What did she tell you?” Josie asked. She didn’t know how much he would retain about his family and how much Night Vale would erase as it took hold over him.  They would know in the next few days. Parental memories tended to stick. Cecil’s father died when he was too young to remember him (devoured by Street Cleaners, poor man) so Cecil really had only his mother’s memory to call upon. 

 

“‘Someday someone’s going to kill you, son, and it will involve a...’” Cecil swallowed and his voice became hoarse, “’a mirror.’”

 

Josie’s heart wrenched.  “Cecil,” she whispered. “It’s not like that. Not quite.”

 

“Then what happened?!” Cecil asked, his voice cracking and tears at once spilling from his eyes and smearing blood down his face. 

 

“Exactly what it was supposed to. Exactly what always happens. Night Vale found you.”  
  



	3. I Think Therefore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which much is explained and Cecil becomes something other than what he was.

Spring, 1989 CE

“…I think the radio station is fun!” Cecil said to his reflection.  As he spoke he watched the flickering movement.  At first he only saw it, the flickering, when he was speaking into his tape recorder.  He only caught glimpses out of the tail of his eye, always just at the cusp his peripheral.  Then it followed him even after he pressed stop. He could feel it even when he couldn’t see it, like someone staring at him behind his back.  But even then he only saw that strange movement when he spoke.  Now the flickering motion never stopped, as if the whole world was trying to keep some great secret covered, hidden from him.  It had been following him since morning.  It waited for him around every corner.  He could almost feel it bearing down on him like a pack of spider-wolves. 

 

He felt hunted.  He felt watched.  He felt scared.  He had hardly slept in days, since his mother disappeared.  He was afraid of what would happen if he let his guard down for that long.  Whatever was causing reality to flicker would fall upon him, he was sure of it.  At school he was distracted, listless.  His friends, especially Earl, had been worried about him.  Earl offered to stay with him at his house and keep watch.  But Earl could not see the flickering.  No one did.  No one else knew it was there.  Cecil was sure it wasn’t after them.  It had chosen _him_ for whatever reason and he was determined to not let it get the better of him.  Three days of this vigilance was starting to wear him down. But whenever he felt the extreme fatigue starting to get to him, he saw that flickering, like someone hiding behind the fabric of reality – like a spy behind a curtain – and anxiety would jolt him awake.

 

“I think the radio station is hidden,” Cecil continued.  It was.  It was hidden even when people saw it.  They saw it but they didn’t _see_ it.  They saw what they thought they saw.  They looked without seeing.  The real station was beyond that, deeper, burrowed in the sands, rooted into the very core of the Earth.  It was below them, around them, above them, looming over them like a… “I think the radio station is like a dark planet lit by no sun.” 

 

Then Cecil said something else.  He didn’t intend to say them, but the words were pulled from him.  He didn’t know what they meant.  But they came.  They overpowered him.  They came out of his mouth and in his voice.  The words came from him slowly, sound by sound, pulled out of his very core.  “I think, therefore I soon won’t be.”  The impact of these words hit him like a cinderblock to the chest.  He shivered, feeling ill suddenly.

 

When he said those horrible, foolish words, the flickering grew.  It swelled in his vision, momentarily blinding him to anything else.  The whole world was twisting, rippling, like something was about to burst out from it.  When the wave of movement ebbed, he was startled to see his own terrified face.  He had forgotten he was standing in front of a mirror.  He had forgotten uncovering it. 

 

“I am looking in a mirror,” he said, almost as much to himself as to the tape-recorder.  “The mirror is not covered.”  He swallowed, his eyes chasing the flickering motion as it crawled across the hallway.  “The flickering movement is…just behind me.  I—”

 

At that instant, something invisible -- or barely visible, flickering, insubstantial –- and impossibly strong coiled around his throat, squeezing.  It was at once hot as high noon and cold as the void, he could feel it burning and freezing his skin, tightening, tightening, tightening.  Cecil screamed until he couldn’t anymore.  It, whatever it was, lifted Cecil off of his feet without any sign of difficulty.  He hung by his throat, choking, spluttering, his body weighing heavily on his neck.  Explosions of color sprayed across his vision like fireworks.  All he could see was a blurred stain of the world, flickering, moving, alive.

 

Whatever his attacker was, it was everywhere.  It was more than just in his sight; yes, he could see it, but it was also ringing in his ears. He could taste it like dry dust on his tongue. It clogged his nose and burned his sinuses. It rubbed against his skin like sandpaper. It was everywhere and nowhere. Even as it was killing him, _choking him_ , he couldn’t grab it. He couldn’t even touch it.  When he tried, his fingers found nothing but coils of air, currents that his hand slipped through, no more substantial than the wind. 

 

He thrashed, kicked, bit and grabbed imprecisely, inelegantly.  He succeed only in dislodging his glasses, a violent jerk from the flickering sent them flying. Distantly, he heard them shatter against the wall.  He was not following any martial arts technique or remembering any maneuver he’d been taught in boy scouts. He was beyond that now, hopelessly so. At first he’d tried running through the Boy Scouts of Night Vale Combat Handbook -- he had earned his Go For The Eyes badge, after all –- but as the air was squeezed from his throat and the oxygen stolen from his brain, the lessons fell away. He didn’t remember how to fight.  He only knew how to struggle.  He wished he hadn’t left his Student Issue Firearm with his backpack. He wondered if his shaking fingers would have even been able to grip it. 

 

All of his energy was focused on escape.  It hurt.  Oh God, it hurt.  He thought his head was about to pop off, he felt so much pressure building there.  Everything felt swollen and heavy –  more so, the longer he struggled.  He was no longer Cecil Palmer.  He was no longer human.  He was an animal.  He just wanted to escape. He would have done anything to get away, including chewing off his own limb. 

 

All he could do now was fight like an animal. Kicking, biting, slashing, wriggling. He tried to hit his attacker with his tape recorder. Eventually, it went the way of his glasses. He distantly heard it hit the floor, although it sounded miles away, a dull and distant thud. He used the tentacles he inherited from his father’s mother – a shape-shifting inter-dimensional blob – to swing and grab, but they were no more efficient than his human limbs.  All ten were smacked away, beaten back.  Wherever he squirmed the flickering responded with a grabbing claw or blunt strike. He swore he could feel teeth.  It swung him like a toy as if he weighed nothing at all. 

 

He had nothing left.  No energy, no weapon, no secret.  He was going to die.  Finally, he gave up struggling.  He could do nothing else.  He could not move even if he wanted to.  He hung there, uselessly, and waited for death.

 

He felt the flickering envelop him.  Its sandpaper touch grated against his skin. He felt the flickering in his throat and lungs.  It choked him – no, not choked. It was like drowning.  He couldn’t breathe anything but the flickering.  The flickering was filling his lungs.  His chest and throat were aching.  They were burning with a bright white pain, like fire.  He felt he was being consumed by fire from the inside out.  He felt he was drowning in flames.  He expected to see smoke rising from his body, bright white light bursting from his chest and neck.  He didn’t, but he coughed up blood.

 

Everything that wasn’t his throat, chest, mouth, or tongue was losing feeling. He could still feel the rushing, boiling pain down his throat into his chest but then even that began to dull.  The hot, dry swell began to fade like a wilting flower, replaced by a dull throb like a second heartbeat.  Just as it was subsiding, an even worse pain, which a moment ago Cecil would not have believed possible, burst like an artery against his forehead. 

 

Not _against_ his head.

 

 _In_ his head.

 

 _In his head, tearing outward_ , ripping through bone and muscle and skin.

 

Outward, not inward.

 

_Outward._

 

It took so long.  His skull cracked.  His muscle stretched and slowly tore, layer by layer.  The skin split apart as something pushed, strained, and finally ripped its way through. 

 

Something inside him was escaping his skull.

 

Something hot and wet was flowing down his face and Cecil didn’t know if it was tears or blood or rain.

 

He felt himself breaking under the pain. Pain was all he knew, all he felt, everything else was numb, bloodless, empty, dead. It had gotten to the point where all he wanted was an ending. The absence of pain. That was all he wanted. All he ever remembered wanting. 

 

Then everything stopped.  It let him go.  He fell. 

 

And he did not know anything more. 

 

He didn’t remember hitting the floor. He wasn’t sure how long he’d lain there before Old Woman Josie broke in.  He could only half hear her as she helped him into the kitchen.  She eased him into a chair and Cecil fell back against the seat, exhausted, empty, aching. 

 

The pain returned with his consciousness. Every part of his body ached.  He was too tired to move much more than a finger.  But for some reason, he could keep talking, despite the pain and fatigue. He was cold. He knew he was covered in blood and bruises. But he knew so little else.  He had forgotten something but he could not remember what. He had forgotten many things but he didn’t know what any of them had been.  His head felt heavy, yes, but also empty. 

 

His name was only a word. He barely felt attached to it. Every time Old Woman Josie said “Cecil,” it jolted through him. Every time, it was a reminder of who he was, or at least what he was called.  When she asked him things, he found himself answering, but he didn’t know where the answers were coming from.  He didn’t know the things he told her, but somehow he must have, because he told her. 

 

Was he dead?  Had he died and had Old Woman Josie died, too?  Where was his mother?  What had killed him?  What was that...what had it looked like?  What had it been?  A glow? A reflection?  A shade?  A light?  He couldn’t remember.  How could he have forgotten?

 

Josie reassured him he was very much alive. But if that was true, then what was going on?  He repeated his mother’s prophecy. Josie told him it was supposed to happen, whatever it was.

 

Night Vale had found him. 

 

That made a wave of something warm and tense and unknowable break over him and drag him under.  “What do you mean?” Cecil asked slowly, quietly. He was suddenly afraid. He was afraid because he wasn’t afraid.  His conscious self was terrified of what his unconscious seemed to accept. 

 

“You know about the prophecy, Cecil.  You talk about it all the time,” Old Woman Josie told him. 

 

“What does this have to do with me taking over for Leonard?” Cecil asked cautiously. 

 

Josie actually chuckled, a wrinkled thumb wiped the blood from his forehead. It was a gentle laugh as if he’d said something ridiculous and naïve. Cecil felt his cheeks heat up; Josie had always been like the grandmother he never knew, as well as a very dear friend. He was hurt that she would laugh at a time like this. 

 

“Everything,” she said, gently. 

 

He frowned, although even that minuscule movement brought another throb of pain. “How?” he asked. He still didn’t understand why talking didn’t irritate his throat further or why his voice wasn’t hoarse.

 

“What does everyone call Leonard?”

 

“Neat?” Cecil asked. It was, at least, what Cecil called Leonard. 

 

“The Voice,” Josie provided. She taped gauze over the gashes on his cheek. 

 

“Oh...right,” Cecil said, straightening his arm as Josie wrapped a bandage over the scratches there.  Cecil kept his tentacles (now flattened in the second dimension against his skin) still so the bandage would cover them, as well. 

 

Obviously. How had he forgotten that?  Leonard was the Voice of Night Vale.  There couldn’t be another.  He spoke to them.  He told them what they needed to know.  He guided them.  It was his job.  It was his role.  It was how he fit into the great organism of community.  How could Cecil have forgotten that?  How could anyone else be what Leonard was? 

 

“People either think it’s just a job,” said Josie, “or they don’t quite understand what it means. They just figure he’s psychic.”

 

“Well, isn’t he?” Cecil asked. Psychics were hardly unusual.  Cecil’s mother was one.  35% of Night Vale had some kind of psychic power or other.  Reporters were often psychic.  It made the job easier.  That was one of the insider tricks of the trade Cecil had learned during his internship.  It always made him a little worried about his own success; despite his mother’s precognitive abilities, Cecil was completely devoid of any and all psychic skills. 

 

“Yes, but it’s more than that,” Josie answered. “He’s a part of Night Vale. He can see and feel and smell and taste and hear everything that’s happening in Night Vale.  He knows every single person and thing in Night Vale. He’s open to it and it is open to him.”

 

“But, I can’t do that stuff!” Cecil paused for a moment, “– can I?”  He couldn’t remember being able to.  But he couldn’t remember much.  He wasn’t entirely sure about anything.  Maybe he could.  Maybe he was.  Maybe he was doing it now. 

 

Old Woman Josie felt around in her purse for something as Cecil watched, panic rising in his gut. “It’s not Leonard who’s special,” Josie said into her bag (before muttering “where is that dang thing?”). “It’s what he is, not who he is. And it’s what you are now, too.”

 

Josie found what she was looking for and Cecil realized with horror that it was a compact. “No!  Not a mirror!  Please!” Cecil tried to get away from it.  He tried to move.  He wasn’t sure what had happened to him earlier, but he didn’t want it to happen again. He wasn’t sure what had hurt him, but something had. And he knew one thing - it involved a mirror, and he promised himself then and there he would never look in a mirror again. 

 

Old Woman Josie was looking at him with wide eyes. She put the compact back in her bag. “Fine, we’ll do it your way.”  She got up again, still creaking and slow. Cecil felt terrible for making her do all this. He couldn’t make himself look in a mirror, though. He couldn’t.  “Bowls?” Josie asked. 

 

“Next to the sink, on the right side,” Cecil said, “or…the left?”  The left side it was, and Josie took down one of Cecil’s mother’s cauldrons; one of the smaller ones with no real practical use in divining or creating useful charms. She paused, however, and looked back at Cecil. 

 

“Mind if I ask you a couple questions?” Josie asked. 

 

He shook his head much the way he had nodded, the slightest motion to indicate what he meant.  He realized he was forgetting things, unimportant things, things he should know.  For example, he didn’t remember where his room was.  He couldn’t picture it in his mind’s eye.  It was somewhere in this house, behind one of the four doors in the hall, but he didn’t know which it was or what it looked like. 

 

 “How long has your mother been gone?” she asked, gently. 

 

Cecil opened his mouth to answer (despite the hot jolt of pain this sent along his jaw line), but he quickly closed it again. How long had she been missing?  Was she missing?  He distantly remembered that, as if it had happened in a dream. She disappeared sometimes, though, didn’t she?  Why was he having such a hard time remembering something so easy, so commonplace? Mothers sometimes do this kind of thing. At least, his did.  Didn’t she?  Yes.  Maybe.  Yes.  She definitely liked to hide from him.  Sometimes for hours?  Days?  Weeks?  Did she hide from him?  If she did, why was he worried about her now? 

 

Something terrible struck him. What did she look like?  Why was his memory of his mother this distant hazy image, as though looking through frosted glass? He knew the approximate features but nothing more. He squeezed his sore eyes closed, willing himself to remember her. It came back to him, piece by piece. 

 

Brown skin, a little lighter than his own.  One dark red eye glinting like a fierce ruby from her long face, the vacant socket where the other eye had been was covered by a velvet eye-patch. She had a narrow chin. Ears decorated in jewels, one with a knick at its tip. Spider-like hands; thin, deft fingers. Thin lips.  Her voice was a low, hoarse hiss, calming, nurturing.  She had a scar on her neck shaped like the thin bright lightening that struck out in the desert.  It was long and tight over the tense sinews of her throat, like a guitar string pulled taut.

 

Yes. That was her. How could he have forgotten her, even for a moment?  Why was the image so hard to hold onto?  

 

But he refused to lose it. He remembered her voice. He forced himself to keep it, to bottle it, to record it forever...

 

...Why record?  Surely he meant remember. Yes. Remember. 

 

Record.  A tape?  No.  Remember.  He meant remember.  Wasn’t there a tape?  Why would there be a tape?  A tape of what?

 

How long had she been gone this time?  

 

“Th-three days, I think,” Cecil answered, swallowing.  “Maybe more than that.  I can’t remember.  I am trying, but I cannot remember…” His voice was quivering. 

 

“What about your brother?”

 

“Brother?” 

 

Icy fear flooded Cecil’s veins. Did he have a brother?  Hadn’t it always just been his mother and him in this old house?  No, no, he had a brother. He did. He did, once. Always?  What was his name?  He was older than Cecil. Older by...how many years?  What was his name?  Cecil saw this tall lean shape, a sharp shadow, but mostly darkness. The static of a human voice.  They always said he looked like their father.  The father Cecil never knew.  Or did he know him?  Was he alive, too?  No.  Forget him.  Focus.  Who looked like his father?  Brother.  His brother he could not remember.  That thin sharp shape.  For a moment Cecil had the name and clutched at it. But it slipped away from him again.  It was as useless as trying to catch a cloud.

 

Who was he looking for?  Who was he trying to remember?  His brother. The brother he wasn’t sure existed. But it’s there. He’s there somewhere. He’s a shadow, a silhouette cut out of the blackness.  He’s a hum.  He’s a name on the tip of your tongue.  He’s a dream you forget the second you wake up.  He’s that thing you needed to tell someone but forgot the moment you saw them.

 

Cecil tried to catch that fleeting image of his brother.  It was like mist or a mirage.  Every time Cecil reached him he became more distant, more vague, more warped and indistinct.  Cecil didn’t know if this person he was chasing was even real, or if his entire existence was a trick of the light. 

 

“Cecil,” Old Woman Josie’s voice broke through his thoughts. And the shadow of the boy was gone, whoever he was. “It’s alright. Let him go.  No one’ll remember him soon, anyway.” 

 

“Who?” Cecil asked, opening his eyes.

 

“No one,” Old Woman Josie answered.  She filled the cauldron with water and brought it before Cecil. “Now look at yourself.”

 

Cecil swallowed but obeyed.  What he saw shocked him so badly he knocked the cauldron to the ground. He didn’t recognize the face looking back at him. He knew it was his. He recognized the shape of the nose, the length and texture of the hair, the chin and jaw.  All of the features were his, but they were somehow wrong.  Something was just unshakably wrong.  The face that was his – but wasn’t his – stared back at him with that same horror.

 

He had been changing invisibly for some time. Cecil had felt it. He thought the disassociation and unease he was beginning to feel when looking at his reflection was part of growing up. He assumed crippling identity crisis was a vital part of puberty. It was hard to say. The only thing his teacher seemed to imply about puberty was universal shame and insecurity. 

 

It wasn’t only the physical changes that made his face not his face. It was something deeper than the skin; the skin that was swollen, bleeding, and bruised, distorted by injury.  It was something behind the eyes.  The eyes were not his. They were in his eye sockets but that only meant that someone or something must have torn his out and replaced them with these.  His were brown and dark. They did not shine like these. These eyes were purple, keen as a cat’s, and bright as the sun.

 

They didn’t see things the same way. He thought he had been imagining the distortion but now he wondered if things really were brighter, the colors sharper, more saturated. He thought this was a result of a concussion, or a trick of the light, or because he lost his glasses.  Now he was beginning to suspect this was how his new eyes saw.

 

In the center of his forehead, smeared with blood, was a bulge of flesh hemmed on the bottom with a crease or slit. It looked like a closed eye, but larger than an eye should be and without eyebrow or eyelashes. Slowly, carefully, with shaking fingers he pressed against the lump.  It hurt a little, it was tender, but he felt the gelatin curve of an eyeball underneath it. 

 

“D-do people usually grow third eyes at my age?” Plenty of people had extra eyes. That was normal.  Leann Hart, infamous reporter who never let things like morality or ethics get in the way of her scoop, had eight eyes, the two in the usual location and six smaller ones forming half circles underneath them. But people were born like that. Eyes were complex organs to grow after birth. Limbs were one thing; Dennis Li (who was in Cecil’s chemistry class) had grown yet another arm last Wednesday, but eyes were different. 

 

“No,” Josie answered. “But it’s been known to happen, and to people even older than you.”

 

“But only the Voice?” Cecil asked.

 

“Only the Voice has an eye like that,” Josie nodded.  

 

“How old was Leonard?” Cecil asked.  Leonard had a third eye on his neck, also larger than his other two. It never blinked. That was one thing that made it so strange.  The other strange thing was that the pupil was yellow and not a single set shape.  It mimicked the shape of the moon, waxing and waning in and out of view. 

 

“36,” Josie said.

 

“Once...once it opens, what happens?” Cecil asked anxiously, his finger trased the seam of the lid. 

 

“It won’t open until you open it, Cecil.”

 

“And what happens?!” Cecil asked, staring into the face that was and wasn’t his. He swore he saw the eyelid twitch and it made his voice break, cracking from panic as much as from his age. 

 

Josie looked sympathetic. “Everything that Night Vale is, everything Night Vale ever was, and everything Night Vale will ever be will be inside you.  You’ll know everything.”

 

“What?!  How?!”

 

“Night Vale,” Josie answered.  There was no answer beyond that.  How could there be? It made sense, that explanation. 

 

“I can’t!  There’s no way all that’s going to fit in my head!”  Whether his head felt empty or not, there was only so much the human mind could cope with before it ceased to function.

 

“It will fit, Night Vale made sure of that.”

 

Cecil shivered. He felt anxious tears in his strange purple eyes. “I’m scared,” he whispered. 

 

“You should be,” said Josie kindly. “Everyone should be. The world is an awesome and terrible place with the unknown bearing down on all sides. Everyone should always be afraid, but you’ll have a leg up on the rest of us. The unknown might sometimes still be unknown, but no matter what, you’ll be able to see some outlines where the rest of us only see black.  Sometimes you’ll see the whole thing while we’re all scrambling around blind.” 

 

Cecil looked up at her.  Old Woman Josie smiled at him. 

 

“And then you can help the rest of us.” She wiped the tears from his eyes. “You can do it, Cecil.  You were born to do it.”

 

Cecil nodded. He closed his eyes and focused on the one in his forehead.  It took effort before he even felt it move. It was like trying to lift the universe. Then he felt the muscles give, the eye flit open, for a half second he saw the familiar kitchen – but then it was gone. 

 

Gone and replaced by…Makers of Us All, what was it replaced by?

 

Cecil lost himself immediately. 

 

Lost himself in the bright-dark-bright-dark of thousands of years worth of days swinging around him.  People were born and died in an eternal instant.  He saw every moment of their existences in agonizing detail and he saw them as only a flickering half moment in the corner of his eye. 

 

He was in an infinite ocean of existence.  He lived every life with them.  He smelled blood and flowers and meat and sand and rain and wine.  He saw colors without names, faces of people he loved although he did not know them. He saw snow falling over mountains – neither of which he believed were real.  He heard voices, millions of voices all speaking at once, so many he could not tell what language any were speaking. He heard crying, laughter, screaming, chanting, gurgling; he heard the thunder of applause, the rippling grainy scrape of sand, the whine of machinery, the drip-drip-drip of water or blood or sweat.  He heard sounds he could explain or comprehend.  He swore he could hear all the universe pounding in his ears. He felt.  He felt every emotion ever experienced, all at once, all in succession, an unending flipbook of experiences.  Love, hate, anger, mourning, joy, shame, fear, sorrow, relief; feelings that did not have names, were too complex for words.  He felt every sentiment beyond expression.  He loved and hated the same people with equal intensity.

 

He was far beyond himself.  “Cecil” had disappeared a long time ago.  He could not have told you who “Cecil” was.  He could not even tell you who or what he was.  He did not exist as a being, as an entity.  He was part of the mural of human life he was observing, not a player, not a figure, something like the paint, the thing through which these lives were expressed rather than the lives themselves. 

 

Every sense was taken from him as he experienced everything all at once.  More than everything.  It was more than anything and infinitely larger than Cecil ever imagined infinity.  Night Vale stretched out around him in every direction.  Everything was constantly growing, changing, stretching out from the center.  Time had a smell.  Color had sound.  Music had a taste.  He could see each and every individual atom.  He could see the whole from above.  He could see each part in minute detail while also watching it work in its whole. Everything was in motion.  Nothing remained the same.  The only thing that was constant was the desert.

 

And there were things beyond. 

 

He could see them. 

There were the black figures that watched. 

There was a dark planet lit by no sun that hovered. 

 There was a giant masked army that loomed.

There was a man in a tan jacket with a deer-skin suitcase that…what did he do?

 

There was something alive in the sand.  The wind was like breath.  There were things below the desert, no, below the _sand_ , but part of the desert, the desert itself, the thing the sand covered.

 

For some reason Cecil wasn’t afraid.

 

A tendril of the thing that was the desert rose up, almost like a rattlesnake, tense above him, but huge, vast, impossibly large over Cecil’s tiny frail form.  It dove at him.  No, it dove _through_ him. When it came out the other side, he saw his own shadow inside of it, growing, lengthening, spreading through it, like ink in water. 

 

He felt suddenly heavy.  Not heavy.  Rooted, as if his body went deeper than himself.  He was part of the desert and it was part of him.  Just like Old Woman Josie said.  He understood now.  He understood so much. 

 

He understood so much. 

 

  
***

Josie watched as the eye opened. She knew what would happen next, it was what always came next. Each Voice had tried to explain to her what they saw, what Night Vale revealed to them as they melted into one entity.  It never made sense to her. Her mind, she knew, was protecting itself. There was no way she would be able to survive knowing what they did.  They could comprehend infinity, even if they didn’t know they could. They were more than human, even if they didn’t know they were. 

 

Cecil would doubtlessly do the same when he came back. When his third eye opened for the first time, he tensed in his seat. All three eyes were open now, glowing a color without a name. His mouth hung open in a silent scream. His fingers clutched uselessly at his seat. He twitched and writhed as the desert opened up to him. The glow spread.  The light erupted from his open mouth, from the tops of his hands and feet, from his sternum.  She prepared the things she knew he would need when he came back. 

 

Under the sink she found a plastic bucket that seemed relatively spider-ghost free. From the Flag Day Emergency Kit she retrieved a shock blanket, some smelling salts, and a Blood Stone necklace. She put some water in the teakettle and set it to boil. 

 

Then she waited. 

 

There was no set time for this part of the process. Night Vale would do as much as it saw fit, it would unravel in front of its new Voice, the Voice now melding into Night Vale as it had done to the Voice.  It would drag Cecil through the infinity of its existence until it became too much and he started to lose himself. 

 

Cecil had been in such bad shape, Josie did not expect it to last long. How long could a 15-year-old deal with a concept that a 12,000-year-old could not?  How long would Cecil be able to contemplate what he was, what Night Vale was? How long could he observe all things from all times from both inside and outside?  Longer than anyone had in years -- centuries even.

 

The minutes he hung in that chair, tense, bloodless, light steaming from his chest, his eyes, his open mouth, his hands, his feet, passed for Josie like decades. The images of eyes opened on the backs of his hands, on the tops of his feet, and on his sternum.  They twitched and quivered as if trying to adjust their vision.  Josie thought that may have been the end – it sometimes was – but he kept going.  Josie was beginning to worry. 

 

Finally, Cecil collapsed backward. His original eyes, new in color but not in placement, rolled back into his head. His tensed muscles relaxed and turned to jelly. His head lolled on a neck too tired to support it. The third eye remained open.  The crescent pupil watched Josie as she pulled her tired bones to attention again. She cracked open the smelling salts and passed it under Cecil’s nose. He jolted awake, going from pale to green. Josie shoved the bucket into his hands and Cecil wretched violently. It continued in waves until he emptied his stomach and gagged dryly. Josie wrapped the shock blanket around his shoulders, sliced her palm on a Blood Stone necklace and hung it around Cecil’s neck. The teakettle was whistling and she turned off the heat beneath it, filled a mug with boiling water, and dropped into it a bag of green tea.

 

“How are you feeling?” she asked as she worked.

 

Cecil responded with a mute wide-eyed stare.

 

“That’s normal,” Josie assured him as she put the mug in his hands.  “I’m going to give Leonard a call, see if he can lend a hand in getting you acquainted with your powers.” 

 

Still no answer from Cecil. 

 

She called Leonard.  He knew why and broke the subject of Cecil before she even said “hello.”  They spoke briefly; she occasionally cast glances sideways at the shell-shocked child staring at his reflection in his tea.  She thanked Leonard and hung up.  Then a tiny voice, barely above a whisper came to Josie. “What happens to me now?”  It was Cecil. 

  
“In what way?”  She asked gently.

  
Cecil managed a shrug. 

  
  
“You’ll learn how to replace Leonard. You’ll drink a lot of coffee.” She knew that Cecil did not like coffee, but she knew that would change quickly.  “You’ll get to know your new powers, who and what you are. You’ll go to school. You’ll see your friends. You’ll bowl.  You’ll do the things you’ve always done.”

  
  
“Where will I go?” he asked pitifully. 

  
  
At first Josie didn’t answer. Her heart broke. This is what happened when they came young. He still needed the family that was never coming back. “You can stay with me,” she answered after a moment. “You can stay with me as long as you need to.”

  
  
And he did. 

***

 

Time passed. 

 

Cecil moved into the guestroom that Josie never used for anything, particularly guests. It was dusty and quiet, filled with the broken things and outdated things – China that Josie liked too much to throw away (even though most of the set was broken), books that had yellowed and decayed, bits of fabric that had once been clothing, dried flowers, a single mummified hand, a few dull and dented ceremonial blades, a little bit of everything accumulated over the course of several hundred lifetimes. 

 

Cecil and she cleaned the room out together, and Cecil turned the bare space into his home. He filled it with himself. He hung posters on the walls; he brought in his tapes, CDs, and radio.  He took down the mirror (careful not to catch his reflection in the glass) and put a corkboard in its place. 

 

He covered the corkboard in pictures of his life now, his present, and a single picture of his mother and himself as a child.  It was the only image on the corkboard in which Cecil’s eyes were brown. Although Cecil was one of the people in the picture, it seemed like one of those Memento Mori photographs people were so fond of when cameras were first invented; a final memory of those long gone – his mother and the Cecil he once was.  The corkboard and all of its pictures kept Cecil grounded.  That was him, these were the friends who loved him and whom he loved, those were the places he knew, trails he had traversed before, this was the life of Cecil Gershwin Palmer, _his_ life.  Josie noticed a new addition to the corkboard shortly after Cecil’s sixteenth birthday, a single post-it note with the words “I Am” in Cecil’s clean print.

 

The room became Cecil’s, just as the house as a whole became his home. It seemed to reflect his presence more than it did Josie’s. It only made sense; he was young, she was old.  She would find him in the early morning on weekends in front of the TV, watching old Westerns and musicals he had taped, eating cereal with orange milk.  In the evening he would sit at the kitchen table and do his homework while she cooked, writing in one of his non-pens, scowling over his Modified Sumerian textbook.  At night he would stay up late listening to the radio for hours and hours.   For years, Cecil’s radio was the last sound Josie heard every night and the first thing she heard every morning.  

 

His friends came in hoards.  The laughter and angst of adolescence hung in the atmosphere like ozone. Old Woman Josie came to know the children she had heard so much about from Cecil’s stories and gossip; not as she once did as a distant specter, but like a parent, or a grandmother. She never realized before how much she missed youth. Cecil’s friends did the things teenagers now, apparently, did. So much had changed, but much also stayed the same. It was refreshing and familiar at once. 

 

It was during these years that Josie decided to open up again, to be more than just a patron in an opera box, to be a singer on the world stage.  She no longer just collected the stories of Night Vale, she lived them; she became part of them.  She didn’t realize how much she had missed it. She felt...well, not young again, such a thing was hardly possible after 12,000 years, but she certainly felt a few thousand of those years melt off her shoulders.

 

It was hard when Cecil left for Europe. He hadn’t planned on it. Indeed, he was a journalism major at Night Vale Community at the time. But one day, he just disappeared.  Josie was terrified.  In Night Vale, he was too important to die, but he was no longer in Night Vale.  Josie knew there were forces in the universe far stronger than Night Vale that could harm him, even kill him. Night Vale was stronger than any human being could ever hope to comprehend, like a huge spider to a cloud of tiny gnats. But there were things that were larger than spiders, there were things that ate them. 

 

That was why she actually cried with relief when Cecil’s postcard came from Svitz.  His adventures across the Atlantic lasted about four years in all. He returned one day as mysteriously as he had left. He was older, a little bruised; he cut his hair differently (shorter), he’d gotten a few tattoos (although there were far fewer than now; Josie often teased him about running low on blank skin at this point), but his smile, his excitement, his way of telling stories were all the same. He was still Cecil, simply a more grown-up Cecil.

 

Apparently Europe had done him good emotionally, and he had mastered (or at least had better control over) those powers he struggled with as a teenager. He didn’t wake up screaming anymore often than anyone else now. He could absorb the whole of Night Vale without nervous collapse. He didn’t have babbling fits in which history, future, and present overlapped.  He wasn’t exhausted by simple existence anymore.  Somehow Cecil taught himself what Leonard Burton could not.

 

And Leonard...

 

The day after Cecil Palmer returned to Night Vale, Leonard Burton disappeared. He had ended his last show differently for the first time in his tenure, no longer “See ya, Night Vale, see ya!” but “Goodbye, Night Vale.”

  
  
Cecil understood. His voice replaced Leonard’s. Leonard Burton slipped from people’s memories. He was simply removed and replaced, or dripped away like melting ice, feature by feature, word by word, until all that remained was Cecil and his now.  The Voice of Night Vale was Cecil Palmer.

 

Josie no longer saw Cecil’s ancestors in him. They had disappeared a long time ago. The shape of his nose and jaw and eyes were his alone. The gestures he made with spindly fingers and long tentacles no longer conjured images of the dead.  But his voice was something else altogether. In his voice Josie could hear all their voices. Every single man, woman, or otherwise that had ever lent their minds, vocal cords, and hands to Night Vale.  They were in every word Cecil said, if one knew how to listen. Every Voice, from Josie’s sister, now so long dead, to Cecil himself. 

 

But Cecil was special, somehow, even among the Voices. Josie, herself, couldn’t explain it.  There was a powerful loyalty in Cecil; as if being the Voice was not an obligation but a choice, a passion, so different from the insecurity of his teens. More than any other Voice, Cecil was part of the town both as a community and as a whole. 

  
  
He took to the mic when he was 24… 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to get up! I hope you enjoy it! This was probably the most fun to write.


	4. Vox

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to get up, especially considering how short it is! But here you go, the conclusion FINALLY.

Summer, 2013 CE

  
  
…He was 39 now. 

 

Night Vale had changed a lot and very little.  After several centuries as a councilwoman, Pamela Winchell became mayor.  A dog park was built. More hooded figures came from…wherever it was they came from.  The Angels revealed themselves to Josie (and she loved them dearly). Wheat and wheat by-products became contraband.  Cecil found love. Lives changed, the things on the surface shifted.  But the earth, the moon, the night, the desert, these all remained the same.

 

Josie finally accepted that time was useless; Cecil’s new boyfriend helped her come to that conclusion.  Time, Carlos the (very handsome) Scientist said, did not work in Night Vale and none of the clocks were real.  She should have figured it out eons ago, but she had somehow been blind to it. It took someone young to point it out, a young Outsider, the kind of person whom Josie would never ask anything of consequence, so confident in his laws of physics and thermodynamics.

 

Time was not real, but people aged.  Time as a concept was faulty.  The drumbeat of years sped up and slowed down depending on where one stood within its infinity. Seconds, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia never stopped.  The only true measure of time, Josie decided, was lifetimes – long or short; each was a unit, a life, a thing pregnant with meaning. Entire epochs passed without ever being so rich, so full, as a human lifetime – a century at its longest, a second at its shortest. Lives were significant; so many beings forgot that fact. Lives were finite and tiny and precious in the void, like unrefined Blood Stones.

 

Cecil’s life went on. 

 

He had never missed a show. He had never skipped a function or ritual. He genuinely mourned each intern. He loved Night Vale. He loved his city and nearly every entity in it.  He would fight for it.  He would die for it.

 

Josie always knew Cecil would be special. She knew he would be great. She wasn’t sure when Cecil would be replaced; no amount of divining had as yet pulled a name from the ether, despite attempts by municipal scryers to do so. They had only gotten a letter “D” – and nothing else – for all the pains they took to find the next Voice.

 

Josie was glad. Part of her hoped they would never find that name and Cecil would keep going. But she knew that that wasn’t possible, and it wasn’t right. 

 

Life, when it worked correctly, was a cycle. Birth, life, death, birth, life, death, and on, and on. Cecil was a link in an ongoing chain of sentient lives. New links still needed to be forged.  The story would continue, but Cecil’s chapter would eventually end.  Cecil would live happily for his time. He would almost certainly marry Carlos; she could feel it in her bones.  They would probably have children (via adoption, a surrogate, black-magic, alien implantation, or otherwise).  Those children (Cecil said he did not want children, but Josie knew he didn’t really mean it; he was too perfect a parent to never have children) would grow.   _They_ would become adults. _They_ would find themselves and become themselves. Their fathers would age and die. To take that from Cecil, that beautiful completeness, would be monstrous.  Josie knew too well how hard it was to watch the ones you love dwindle and die.  She knew the pain of being alone.  She would never wish _life_ on anyone, especially not Cecil.

 

Cecil would live. Cecil would die.  Josie would continue. Night Vale would continue until the end of all things. As long as it lived, so would Josie. She would watch the sun swallow the Earth.  She would watch it from her porch, sunglasses on and knitting.  That was her plan.  Only then, as the desert burned away into gaseous metal and the heat consumed all things would Josie’s story end.  When Night Vale’s story ended, so would Josie’s, and when Josie’s story ended, so would Night Vale’s. 

 

But Cecil’s brief flickering life, so bright, so beautiful, had reminded Josie why she lived. 

 

On the radio, Cecil reported that the children who had gone missing during the Summer Reading Program had returned, lead by 12-year-old Tamika Flynn.  That was Parker Flynn’s – Cecil’s old friend and classmate – daughter. He should be very proud to have raised such a brilliant little warrior.  She was a good girl, she always had been.  It seemed the Summer Reading Program had helped her grow up as well as endow her with a love of knowledge and books.  It was an admirable thing, and Josie hoped Tamika would wear her new scars with pride. 

 

Tomorrow, Josie and one or two Erikas would go down to the Flynns with some salt-free, gluten-free cookies. The Erikas had been working on a new recipe for some time now.  She was sure Tamika would appreciate some sweets after that ordeal. Makers only knew how long she and the other children had been trapped in there, really. Cecil’s voice was swollen with pride as he described Tamika Flynn and the hoard of children she led.  Josie would give Cecil a call to see if he wanted to come with her tomorrow.

 

Outside, the sky was dark, speckled with distant stars and impenetrable void. Even here, on the outskirts of Night Vale, the city lights polluted the sky. 

 

There was no moon that night. The cycle began anew. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also on Tumblr [a-sulk-of-english-majors](http://a-sulk-of-english-majors.tumblr.com/)
> 
> I hope you like it! Thanks!
> 
> The concept of "blobs" as creatures adapted from the super amazing and adorable [Blob Cecil on Tumblr](http://blobcecil.tumblr.com).


End file.
